I fell down an internet hole reading about the etymology of "elf", my mind is still spinning about all the sneaky race stuff that one can slip into what most would consider to be very generic fantasy term.
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Yeah I feel like it's something that could easily get coopted by a modern writer to indicate skin color, even if it didn't originally
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yeah definitely.
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Yeah you're right. Skin colors most often described were red, pink or ruddy because that indicated health or sickness. Elves weren't ID'd by skin color as we would box ppl in today.
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Yeah I mean I’d have to dig into the etymology more but my initial thought is that, even if the word originally meant “white being” somewhere before the OE period, that’s not necessarily positive or racial in the way we would think of it.
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